Writers and Editors (Pat McNees's blog)

(updated 1-29-17, 3-5-16, 3-19-16)
In academia a wide-ranging discussion about open access is weakening academic journals' monopoly on profiting from publishing research findings. Different interest groups view this differently, of course. Meanwhile, as the publishing landscape changes, are academic authors, who have long abandoned claims to copyright on many of their scholarly articles (in the "public or perish" world of university faculty-making), less docile about publishing rights, with tenured faculty positions scarcer and scarcer? This round-up of relevant pieces starts with

• Elsevier Mutiny: Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing (Mathew Ingram, Forbes, 11-2-15) "All six editors and the entire editorial board of the well-respected linguistics journal Lingua have resigned to protest the company’s failure to embrace open access. And the reason says a lot about the ongoing disruption taking place in the formerly sleepy world of academic publishing." See also Language of Protest (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 11-2-15) They "resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online." They reported their frustration at "libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn't even figure out what it would cost to subscribe.".. Professor Johan Rooryck "said Lingua and most journals publish work by professors whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly with public funds. So why, he asked, should access to such research be blocked?"
Later articles will be posted under Comments.

• Further note: The former editors of Lingua are launching a replacement journal, Glossa, which will be Open Access. See their message to Elsevier authors: Lingua Disinformation (Kai von Fintel, Language Log, 11-27-15) I "reiterate my call to the community not to work with Elsevier in propping up Zombie Lingua. Instead, get ready to support Glossa once it’s fully running in January."

• What happens when you don't have open access, and researchers rail against the outrageous fees required to access articles?
Sci-Hub. Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge (Fiona MacDonald, Science Alert, 2-12-16). Welcome to Sci-Hub, the Pirate Bay of science. "A researcher in Russia [ Alexandra Elbakyan} has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers." Interesting dilemma and discussion.
See also this important piece in the Times: Should All Research Papers Be Free? (Kate Murphy, SundayReview, NY Times, 3-12-16), follow-up analysis to the suit against Alexandra Elbakyan but also about the scholarly journals' paywalls she denounced, in which the "largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication. Moreover, they orchestrate the vetting, editing and archiving of articles."
"In response to the suit filed against her, Ms. Elbakyan wrote a letter to the judge pointing out that Elsevier, like other journal publishers, pays nothing to acquire researchers’ studies. Moreover, publishers don’t pay for the volunteer peer reviewers or editors. But they charge those same researchers, reviewers and editors, not to mention the public, whose tax dollars most likely funded the study in the first place, to read the resulting articles."
“That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold,” Ms. Elbakyan wrote. “I would like to also mention that we never received any complaints from authors or researchers.”
Do read the whole article. And, as one journalist points out, accessing a site that has hacked journals may not be the cyber-safest thing to do.

• Open Access Movement: Part 1, Differing Definitions (Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 1-23-17) "Not only is there wide disagreement as to what “freely available” really means, but not everyone in the OA movement even agrees that all scholarship must be freely available, or how quickly it should be made freely available, or what mechanisms are appropriate for making it that way."[He writes about varying definitions by different organizations.] "...it’s important to note that there’s a big difference between identifying different varieties of OA (such as “libre” and “gratis”) and proposing mutually incompatible definitions of OA."

• The NIH Public Access Policy: A triumph of green open access? (Richard Poynder, Open and Shut? blog, 1-20-17) The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) defined open access and then outlined two strategies for achieving open access: (I) Self-archiving; (II) a new generation of open-access journals. These two strategies later became known, respectively, as green OA and gold OA. For OA purists, a research paper can only be described as open access if it has a CC BY licence attached. "Since publishing in a subscription journal requires assigning copyright (or exclusive publishing rights) to a publisher, and few (if any) subscription publishers will allow papers that are earning them subscription revenues to be made available with a CC BY licence attached, we can see the contradiction built into the open access movement."

• The pros and cons of Open Access (Nature). "Supporters of Open Access to scientific literature often portray it as the definitive and inevitable model for scientific publishing, but it is far from being the last word on new modes of access. In reality, stakeholders in scientific publishing are in the midst of adjusting to the revolutionary new possibilities offered by the Web and the online journal article for scholarly communication. "
"The ease by which content can be accessed has created the view that it should be free – despite that fact that everyone knows that creating and distributing content can be an expensive process. We can see the physical results of that process in a book, and understand where the cost (or at least some if it) lies – this does not happen in the same way online. However, scientific publishing is a demonstrably valuable service and one which does not come cheap, particularly in this era of electronic development. Any emerging models will have to be grounded firmly in economic reality to have any chance of success."

• The Cost of Knowledge Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier, the greediest of the academic journals. Mathematician Tyler Neylon set up this page where researchers could publicly declare that they 'will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate.'

• Open Access to Scholarship, Part I: A Conversation with Michelle Pearse (Mary Minow, Fairly Used blog, Stanford University, 12-30-10) Nearly two years ago, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously voted to grant the university a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to distribute faculty’s scholarly articles, with an opt-out mechanism for instance in the case of incompatible rights assignment to a publisher. "Pearse: We were only the second school after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to adopt the open access policy, so it has been interesting to watch the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) evolve over time. We now have 6 schools at Harvard with OA policies. The growth in the number of schools has provided a fabulous opportunity to meet with colleagues working on similar issues, to share thoughts and processes for workflow, experiences with implementing the policies, etc. … especially where scholarship has become so interdisciplinary now."

• Open Access Scholarship, Part II: Eli Edwards' Interview with Richard A. Danner (1-5-11) Edwards: Nearly two years ago, a group of academic law library directors promulgated the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. It called for (1) open access publication of law school-published journals, and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions available in ‘stable, open, digital formats.”

• Academic Exception (Glossary, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard). "Academic exception is the exception for teachers and academics to the general rule that employers hold copyright in the creative works produced by their employees in the course of their employment. Unlike the a work-for-hire situation, academics typically retain the copyrights in the scholarly work they produce, and may retain, sell or assign those copyrights, or dedicate them to the public domain, at their discretion." And here is that glossary's entry for Work for Hire.

• Journal Authors: Intellectual property landlords - or migrant workers? (Dan Carlinsky, ASJA). Alas, ASJA doesn't have this posted now; Dan, if you see this, I'll be glad to post it here, if you like. The title conveys the message, so I'll leave that here.

• Competing Views of Intellectual “Property” (Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 4-13, 09) Understanding the NIH public Access debate from the views of labor theory (Does it reward those for their labor), utility theory (Does it maximize public wealth), personality theory (Does it allow individuals to express themselves?), and social planning theory (Does it lead to a richer society?). " The main battle appears to pit Labor theory against Utility theory." (Draws on William Fisher's Theories of Intellectual Property, 2001).

• An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate (Gordon Bowker, The Independent UK 1-6-12). "On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce's work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate."

Comments

February 15, 2016 5:31 PM EST

Copyright for Education (a blog about aspects of copyright law that affect education, primarily in the UK) reports on a Copyseek Conference for HE Copyright Practitioners, University of Leeds 8-21-14. Scroll down to paragraph starting "After lunch Laurence Bebbington (University of Aberdeen) spoke about the tension between copyright law, open access..." "Laurence was sceptical about open access, saying that it didn't sit well with copyright law as under copyright the author of a work gets to choose what they do with their work and should not be forced to do something with it by someone else."..."Gold open access is also problematic; the requirement to add a CC-BY licence to a work means that there is a loss of control of rights by the author and leaves it open to exploitation by a commercial entity. He cited the case of 'Epigenetics, Environment and Genes', a CC-BY journal article that was made into a book by Apple Academic Press and now sells for over $100 without the knowledge of the author. He left us with the suggestion that there may be ethical issues with open access that perhaps we have overlooked."

- PM

February 15, 2016 5:36 PM EST

Open Access (PLOS's page on Open Access, with sections on The Case for Open Access, PLOS Takes a Different Approach (the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, Benefits of Open Access Research, Additional OA Resources.

Publishers seek removal of millions of papers from ResearchGate (David Matthews, Times Higher Education,10-5-17) Academic social network accused of infringing copyright on a massive scale. ‘James Milne, a spokesman for the group of five academic publishers, which includes Elsevier, Wiley and Brill, said that the first batch of take-down notices would be sent “imminently”. “We’re not doing this in any way against the researchers, we’re doing this against ResearchGate,” he told Times Higher Education. ​The site was “clearly hosting and happily uploading material that they know they don’t have the licence or copyrights” to, and was “refusing to work with us to solve that problem”, he added.’

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